The Sinking of the Titanic

A churning sea crowded with overloaded lifeboats and flailing survivors fills the canvas after the great ocean liner has gone down, the disaster turned into a heaving mass of struggling humanity. Max Beckmann painted the Sinking of the Titanic soon after the 1912 catastrophe, drawing on Gericault's Raft of the Medusa to make a vast modern history painting. Now in St. Louis, it reads in hindsight as a premonition of the coming catastrophe of the First World War - human beings adrift, panicked, and abandoned to the indifferent power of the sea.